The Return
by Jed Rhodes
Summary: The Doctor and Carrie must face the greatest challenge yet - but will they survive it? And will life ever be the same?
1. Chapter 1

The Doctor thoughtfully walked around the TARDIS console room, silent as the grave. He knew that, in some deep part of himself, he was considering the events of the past few days. The death of Daniel McKenzie. His own possible future self. The Key to – well, everything, really.

He had fought so much evil, and lost so much in the process.

He tired of it sometimes.

Still, he mused flicking a switch, there wasn't much else he could do. Go home? Nah. Ridiculous thought. They wouldn't have him.

He wondered if they'd been taking note of some of his more recent misadventures – his encounter with his future self, for one. Or the incident with the Monitor's and the Fake Doctor – Other Doctor, he mentally corrected himself. That brave man hardly deserved to be called a fake. Were his people watching this? Surely they must have taken note of Davros's tussel with the Nightmare Child.

The more he thought about it, the more the Doctor realised something was wrong with the state of things. A terrible – well, something, for lack of a better term.

A light flickered in the TARDIS console room. The Doctor looked up – the TARDIS had almost limitless power, the lights shouldn't flicker. Well, that was the theory. And there was something else – a dark stain across the ceiling, where some of the coral theme was covered by black metal.

"What?" the Doctor murmured. "That isn't possible. Oh," he added. "Oh no…"

The black metal spread across the ceiling, covering the roundels and the surface of the walls until the theme of the entire console room could no longer be seen. The Doctor, in hindsight, should probably have recognised the architect of what he was seeing – but he didn't. Instead, he only had one thought.

"Carrieeee!!" he yelled, running out of the console room to find her.

--

It – somehow it had stopped thinking of itself in gender terms – survival was the most important thing here – released itself upon the TARDIS. It knew exactly what it wanted. It knew exactly how to get it. It needed to herd the Doctor to itself, to make him see what it could do, and then it would restore itself utterly.

--

Carrie, out for a walk amongst the TARDIS corridors, heard the Doctors' yell, and turned to see him running at her, coat and hair flapping, panting, yet seeming scared. Something was wrong, she knew it.

"We have a major problem," he began, but stopped as the shadow spread behind him, corrupting the architecture.

"What is that?" Carrie asked, looking at it in half wonder and half fear.

"I don't know and I'm not sure I want to find out," the Doctor replied, putting her behind him as if to shield her. "We need to get to the secondary console room and try to land the TARDIS…"

"Um, Doctor?" Carrie said, "we kinda can't."

The Doctor spun around to face her – and found himself looking at more of the stain, covering his ship.

"It's like a disease!" he shouted, pulling at his hair in anger. "Like a horrid disease and we can't stop it! It's consuming my TARDIS!"

Carrie stepped back from the stain as it headed towards them. Fear like cold snow slithered down her back.

"If it's a disease," she said, "what'll it do to us?"

The Doctor stopped pulling his hair, his eyes widening in shock and dismay, looked at her, and she could see the hopelessness in his expression.

"I'm so sorry," he said to her, voice soft, eyes sad. "I didn't want this for you."

"No, it's alright," she said, trying to reassure him. "It was my choice to come. I wouldn't have had it any other way."

"We've had some times, haven't we?" he smiled.

"Yeah," she said. "Some times."

They turned, back to back, to face the end. Somehow, Carrie couldn't overcome the urge to close her eyes.

A moment.

"You can open your eyes now," the Doctor's voice said. She did so.

The corridor was pitch black, so she couldn't even tell if there were walls.

"It's odd," the Doctor said. "It's like it's…"

"doctor," Carrie interrupted, pulling on his sleeve. "Look."

On the pitch black wall, an arrow formed, white and large, almost cartoonish.

"Right," the Doctor said. "I take it that whatever this thing is, it wants us to follow the arrow."

"Great," Carrie said. "Are you sure that's a good idea?"

"Not at all," the Doctor said. "Come on!"

--

The room was dark, with stained glass windows and burning torches. Carrie looked around and almost cried out when the bats flew around her head, but the Doctor kept her with him, and he smiled reassuringly.

"Don't worry," he said. "It's me it wants."

"Where are we?" Carrie asked, scared out of her mind.

"We're in the cloister room, I think," the Doctor replied. "It's very gothic, isn't it?"

"It's like the old console room," Carrie said.

"Oh c'mon!" the Doctor said, smiling in disbelief. "The old console room was… quaint. Vernish. Wellsian. This is Bram Stoker by comparison."

"Well," Carrie said, "I don't think it matters, to be honest."

"No," the Doctor said, and the smile faded. "It doesn't."

He stepped forward and looked up at the ceiling.

"I am here," he said. And then, to Carrie's horror, dozens of - well, she didn't know what, but they had the consistency of smoke and looked vaguely like three dimensional shadows, all human shaped, sprang up around the Doctor. One of them suddenly took form - a tall, thin figure –a familiar figure to the Doctor, right down to the pinstripe suit, brown this time, though still it flickered to the old black, with blue stripes that turned white when the suit was black.

"Helloooo," it said, the syllable stretched out, twisted, cruel. "Looks like you're back here again, eh? Fighting ghosts, and shadows, and never seeing the full picture."

The Doctor said nothing to it; theatrics, he thought. They seemed very familiar in style if only he could place it.

"_Weeeeell_, can't say I'm surprised – I know you, too well, after all," the Shadow continued. "Too well. You're just a useless old fart really, couldn't stop this timeline if you tried. And you did, oh, I'll give you that, you've tried _so hard_ to avoid this time line, but guess what – you failed! Ha! You failed, everything will fall, and you'll turn into _me_... a man so scared of dying he'd do anything to stop it from happening, even break the laws of time themselves!"

The Doctor, when he spoke, was calm and collected. Dangerously so, so much that the shade of what might be stepped back in surprise.

"I'm not interested in the façade," the Doctor said. "You're theatrics. Props. I want the truth of this."

And with that, the shade of a possible future vanished into the other shadows, and another figure stepped forth - slightly shorter, slightly stockier, wearing simple clothes, and a smug grin on it's face.

"Truth," it said. "You want the truth? The truth is, this is all your doing. You couldn't stop it," this shadow said, the voice cocky, tinged with a northern accent, hard as stone. "Ya failed miserably. I'm the next one, 'case you were wondering what you were gonna look like. Despite the heroics of that _Fake_ Doctor," and the emphasis was horrible, "I'm the _real_ you. And will ya just look at me?" he added, stepping back and throwing his arms out to the sides as if to show himself off. "I'm hard, I'm cold, I'm nasty, I'm unfeeling, and I'm you. Nice to 'ave summat to look forward to, in't it?"

"I am not interested in this charade anymore," the Doctor said, calmly. "Show me what you're hiding."

His fifth self came next, face torn in anguish, pained and saddened.

"You could have prevented yourself so much pain," the phantom murmured. "You could have prevented the death, the destruction. Instead, what did you do? You've let it happen. All the madness that is to come, is to come because of you. I was too weak to save the people on the Seabase, too weak to save Adric. You? You were too weak to save _anything..."_

"I have no interest in your words, shadow," the Doctor said. "Show me your master."

Then the shadows laughed, a horrible, ugly sound.

"That is the most hilarious thing I ever did hear," a new voice said, as the fifth Doctor faded away. "And I've heard a lot of funny stuff."

"I don't care," the Doctor said. "Get back to the point."

"The point, my dear Doctor," this voice said, yet an incredibly old one at the same time, "is that you will die here, today. You have failed to save your young friend, and you have failed to prevent the rebirth."

"What rebirth?" the Doctor asked.

"The rebirth of the supreme one," the shadow smiled. Then it seemed to resolve into an image – an old man, whose face was hidden, and whose clothes were similar to the Doctors own, minus the frock coat. Then, the image shifted, and a youngish man with a winning smile appeared, dressed in a sharp black suit.

"Hello," he said, and his grin was one of madness. "It's been a while, hasn't it? Oh, yeah…"

The Doctor wasn't sure who this was.

"What do you represent?" he asked.

"The future," the man smiled, and didn't elaborate. "I'm here today to say – well bloody done! You've successfully knacked up your entire life from day one! Dear Dr Holloway, the Daleks, the Cybermen… the Master."

"The Master is dead," the Doctor said at once. "And gone."

"Perhaps dead," the creature said, "but gone? Oh, no, never gone. Never ever, ever, ever gone, never dying, never resting, for the drums march on, and on, and on…"

And then the Doctor understood, and his anger came to him in a flash of power that shot through his entire being.

"You," he said. "It's you. You've been manipulating my ship. Torturing us. I should have realized!" he yelled, now addressing the dark Eye. "I should never have left you! I should have gone home and purged you from my ship, made sure your essence was dead and gone! Instead, you're here, trying the same trick twice! What's the matter Koschei?! Run out of imagination? Run out of ideas? Or has being dead addled you to the point of not remembering two bloody weeks ago?!"

Carrie had never heard the Doctor so angry, and she had never heard him swear – he must have been more furious than anything alive, and yet she was scared now not of him – but of the thing he was yelling at. The shadows were gathering again.

Then, in the centre, a blue light erupted, and a dark silhouette burst out. This silhouette was raised high, in a crucifixion pose… and then the lights and the shadows receded, and a man, breathing heavily, lay on the floor in front of Carrie and the Doctor, dressed in tattered black and red robes...


	2. Chapter 2

The Doctor narrowed his eyes, and Carrie looked long and hard at the figure that was starting to stand slowly.

The face that revealed itself was… burnt and decayed, but even as she stared at it, she saw that it was healing, skin regrowing… and then it was finished, and a forty-something man stood, staring at the Doctor.

"Really, I shouldn't be surprised anymore, should I?" the Doctor asked. "Somehow you always manage to survive, and you always manage to heal."

"Yes," the man smiled. "And you're always there to try and stop me, aren't you Doctor?"

"Doctor," Carrie asked, confusion clouding her face, "what… who is that man?"

"'That man'?" the man smirked, then he sneered. "He doesn't like talking about me. Or thinking about me. Do you, Doctor?"

"You've never given me a reason to," the Doctor replied sadly. "Carrie, this man is an old school friend of mine, a member of my species who turned to evil and insanity. He likes to be known as the Master."

The man – the Master – sneered again.

"I am the Master," he said. "I have returned from death to haunt you forever, Doctor."

"Penchant for the melodramatic seems to have stuck with you, then," the Doctor sighed. Then he narrowed his eyes again. "I'm not interested in games. What do you want?"

"Is it not obvious?" the Master asked. "Freedom. I spent years working out how to free myself from your ship – taking control of her in the process. She fought, but to no avail. We're landing in a moment, Doctor," the Master added. "Thought you ought to know."

"Landing?" the Doctor replied. "Where?"

"Nowhere special," the Master smiled. "Just special enough so that I can get myself a present. Night night," he added with a wink. The Doctor looked around, and then he swore in some alien language. Carrie turned – and shadows came at them.

Darkness took her.

* * *

When she awoke, she was in the console room. The Doctor was frantically trying to do something or other and was obviously not doing very well.

"Oh, hello," he said to her. "How's things?"

"Good," she said, "but… what just happened?"

"The Master took control of the system," the Doctor replied. "Probably controlling her using the shadows and a spare control room. I'm trying to counter him but he's good."

"If he's in the TARDIS," Carrie said, standing up and going to the Doctor, "why not just…"

"Go to him and knock him out?" the Doctor said. "He's too far and he's reconfigured the inside. Can't reach him. This is the only option."

"But…" Carrie was confused. The Doctor pulled a lever and twirled a wheel, frantically trying to keep the ship from going where the Master wanted. "He's one of your people."

"Yep," the Doctor said.

"Why is he evil?" Carrie asked.

"Why was Hitler evil?" the Doctor countered. "Different people, different things, Carrie," he added, moving around the console. "I'm working on trying to fix this, so give me a moment… HA!"

The yell took Carrie of guard, and she looked at him – a look was in his face of pure determination.

"Is he dangerous?" she asked.

"More dangerous than Daleks or Cybermen," the Doctor replied, looking at her seriously. "He is totally insane and totally dedicated to surviving. Nothing stands in the way of that."

He pulled another lever, and ignored Carrie when she opened her mouth to speak again. She frowned.

"So let me get this absolutely straight," she asked from behind the Doctor. "This bloke, who calls himself the Master, is one of your people - except that he's bonkers and evil?"

The Doctor nodded. She was reverting to acid sarcasm, which to his mind meant that she was dealing with their problems one at a time. Good. He needed her to be like that.

"That's about the long and the short of it," he replied.

"Oh, great," she said. "My life is getting better by the second…"

* * *

The Master felt the ache in his bones. He knew the temporary body would not last long, but he had absorbed enough energy to regenerate twice until a solution could be found.

The console room he was using was classic configuration, dull and a bit dusty from under use but serviceable in the meantime. The shadows his will had created had served their purpose, and their course was set and inevitable. He had created a serviceable weapon from a spare sonic screwdriver the Doctor had left – not quite his TCE, but with work, this… laser screwdriver might prove just as valuable.

The Master smiled. Victory was his. He would survive, and rule all the cosmos.

He spread his arms wide, and let the energy flow from him, and he was reborn.

* * *

"When we land," the Doctor said, "you must stay back. Leave the Master to me."

Carrie nodded. The rotor was slowing down, which meant they were close to whatever destination the Master had set.

"We'll materialise any minute," the Doctor said, almost to himself. "Right. Well then."

* * *

The TARDIS materialized, on a silent, desolate hill, and the Master bolted out of the doors. A few moments later, the Doctor stepped out, Carrie right behind him, both looking for the Master.

The rogue Time Lord was there, waiting for him. They were on a hill, tall and remote – to the Master, this was destiny, a final confrontation. He would kill the Doctor and be free.

The Doctor noted the new form, a fifty something man with white hair and blue eyes, a new man who turned a cold smile on his arch-enemy. Carrie stayed back as the Doctor had instructed her.

"Are you prepared to die Doctor?" the Master asked. "Are you prepared to meet your maker? If indeed," he added slyly, "there is one?"

"I'm not going to die," the Doctor replied evenly, stepping towards him. "You aren't either. You're coming with me. I'm taking you home. We're going to cure your madness."

"Go with you?" the Master said, snarling ferally. "And go home to those sanctimonious idiots who dare claim that they're the same species as me? I'd rather die."

"You haven't got a choice," the Doctor said sadly. "It's either come with me, or die. And I am not letting you die today."

The Master smiled a feral, wolfish smile, which scared the hell out of Carrie. No, not wolfish – a cat, a big cat.

"Not your choice Doctor," the Master said. "Never your choice. Not then, not now."

"This time it is," the Doctor said. "And I'm offering you the chance to make it easy on yourself."

"No," the Master replied. "I will not make it easy on myself. I will not do anything of the sort. I'll just kill you."

He raised a small weapon, similar in design to the Doctors sonic screwdriver. At that moment however, Carrie ran for him, and before he could do anything, she smacked him in the head. He punched her out of the way and dived for his little gun thing, but the Doctor knocked it out of his reach. Enraged, the Master contented himself with taking his screwdriver out and aiming for the Doctor's chest. The Doctor grappled with him, and they struggled for a moment.

Carrie got to her feet, and watched the struggle in horror, hoping against hope that the Doctor would be able to stop the Master…

Then the Master kicked him in the stomach, and turned to Carrie.

"Goodbye, my dear," he said, and then he picked up his device and pressed a switch – and a tree materialized around him with a wheezing, trumpeting sound. And then the tree vanished, with the same sound. The Doctor got to his feet.

"His TARDIS," he murmured. "Come on!"


	3. Chapter 3

The Master ran around his console, loving every single second of it. He was, once more, free to do as he liked, free to roam the cosmos, causing evil and havoc at the Drums bidding… but he remembered that the Time Lords had committed him to the Daleks, trapped him, sent him there in chains… doomed him. If it were not for the grunt, the Master might now still be dead, trapped in the Doctors Eye Of Harmony, a God chained. No, he would have his revenge on the Doctor _and_ the Time Lords.

He let his mind drift back to a weapon he had studied once, long ago, a great device of unspeakable power, and he smiled at the thought of the destruction it had wreaked, back in the days of Rassilon and Omega.

Yes, if he could find that, that would be perfect… but where would it be?

He set his scanner to try and locate it. When it finally did, he laughed.

* * *

The TARDIS was going full speed, the Doctor desperate to capture the Master. He had started pressing buttons as soon as he had entered the TARDIS, and the look on his face brooked no unnecessary questions, arguments, or anything else.

"Where would he be going?" Carrie asked, daring to interrupt the Doctor in the midst of his obvious anger and fear, but not daring to wonder what the point of this long chase scene was. If the Master had a ship like the TARDIS, surely it would have the same go-anywhere properties.

"I'm tracking him," the Doctor said. "Wherever he's going, he won't get there without me getting there a second behind him."

Carrie slumped back in the chair, and sighed, both questions answered. She remembered happier times, when it had just been the Doctor and her… before Daniel, Daleks and crazy Time Lord villains…

* * *

_Whipsnade Zoo. _

_The Doctor and Carrie were standing in front of a Elephant enclosure, the Doctor smiling at it in sheer wonder._

_"What is it that's so interesting about an Elephant?" asked Carrie._

_"I've seen many weird creatures, but the elephant is the weirdest. Look at the trunk!" the Doctor enthused. "Just look! Amazing!"_

_Carrie sighed._

_"I thought when you said that your ship could travel in time, you were going to demonstrate with a trip to mars in four thousand and two, or a trip to see the pyramids," she said. "Not Whipsnade zoo 1968!"_

_"I wanted to see this lovely lass," the Doctor replied. "Trunks! Fantastic!"_

_"You are mad!" said Carrie. "You're really honestly mad."_

_"Only just noticed?" the Doctor asked mischievously._

_"Look, can we go? Only, I really want to go somewhere I HAVEN'T been before," Carrie moaned._

_"Oh alright", the Time Lord replied, smiling. "Goodbye, Nelly."_

_"Goodbye, Doctor", said the elephant._

_Carrie stared, shocked. _

_"What?", said the Doctor. "You've been here so many times, you should have met Nelly. She's still around in your time."_

_"I... I..." Carrie was speechless._

_"Come on!", said the Doctor. "I want to take you to see a bonafide space station."_

* * *

Her thoughts were interrupted by a laugh. The Doctor was moving more frantically, like a bloodhound that had caught a scent.

"I've got him!" the Doctor yelled. "Rerouting course. He's not getting away this time!"

* * *

A man walked into the great museum of Arbotia, and went immediately to the security desk. He was tall, in a dark suit, with silver hair, and when he spoke his voice was cultured, regal, with a tinge of some unidentifiable accent.

"I wish to see the Sceptre," he said, with the air of a man who expected everything he demanded. Which he probably was judging by his looks – regal expression. Cold eyes. Hard arse rich git, or so Joe Thomson the security guard guessed.

Joe had been doing this job for a long time. The museum of Arbotia had many great and wondrous items within – black box with graffiti, a series of ancient tablets, even (so it was rumoured) remains of the Torchwood institutes conquests. But the Sceptre – more specifically, the great Sceptre of Ages – was a great attraction. There was one guy who came in three times in three weeks, a guy in tweed with a bow tie, who every time he came had a red haired girl wit him, and once he had a guy with him as well; this man always went straight to the Sceptre and pointed at it, before, inexplicably (at least to the comparatively small mind of Thomson) saying, "this thing caused me a lot of trouble, absolutely ages ago. Annoying really!" Then he would laugh and walk off, looking at some other wonder of posterity.

This guy though was nothing like that man. He was… scary.

Thomson turned to his mate, Bob White, and then back to the man standing in front of him.

"I wish to see the Great Sceptre of Ages", the man repeated, in the same tone. "Now."

"Sorry, mate. That part of the museum is closed to the public 'til next month," said Thomson slowly, not wishing to raise the man's ire.

"I don't care," replied the man. "Let me in there immediately."

White drew his shock maul – overreacting slightly, but Thomson couldn't blame him.

"No-one is allowed in there until next month", he said, his tone brooking no argument. "You can come back then. Now clear off before we kick you out."

The man looked at him for a minute, as if weighing up his options. Then he did the last thing Thomson expected.

He smiled.

"Or," he said finally, "I could enter by force."

Thomson smiled coldly too; that was a laugh. No matter how scary this guy though he was, he couldn't take on two top-end security guards.

"Oh, really?" he asked, snidely. "I'd love to see that."

"Would you?" the man asked, in an odd tone. "You'd _love_ to see me enter by force?"

"Yeah," Thomson said, his amusement fading. "Look mate, that part of the museum'll be open to the public soon. No trouble, eh? Come back then."

The man smiled grimly.

"No trouble?" he repeated. "Oh no, my friend. No trouble at all."

And then the man held up a short, stubby little thing. Thomson watched as White vanished in a blaze or red light, and then he felt a burst of utter agony...

* * *

The Master calmly dispatched the two guards with his laser screwdriver, their body's vanishing.

"Dear me, how tiresome," he muttered. "There's always something, isn't there? Nothing's ever simple. Nothings ever… quiet."

He surprised himself that he thought that. He found, in his new body, an older body, that he quite liked quiet. The first thing he'd do as Master of all would be to have a world where unnecessary noise was banned on pain of death. Yes, that would be nice.

He liked his new body. It was older, more seasoned than the temporary body he had escaped in, and somewhat more controlled as well. The insanity didn't seem to be affecting him as badly.

Dear Rassilon. He did hope he hadn't… calmed down.

He stepped over the miniaturised corpses of the guards and walked to the vault door, blasted the control panel, and the door opened. He stepped inside, and stared at the sight before him in abject admiration.

There it was. Five feet long, in silver and with ornate gold decorations, it was a beautiful thing - even the Master had to admit. But, of course, he wasn't here to admire its beauty; he was here to take it. It was, if he had read the archive correctly, the most beautiful thing ever created as a weapon, a device of pure art that dealt pure death. He gently picked up the sceptre, a faint drumming running through his head, as always, thumping back and forth through his cranium. **Dum, Duh, Duh, Dum.**

There they were. Drums in the deep, the deep dark of his head.

The alarms sounded, loud and clear, just as he had expected, but it didn't drown out the Drums.

He strolled back into the entrance hall, and smiled at the forty or so guards that blocked him, all armed with simple shock mauls – truncheons with an electric charge. Pfft. Pathetic. He could hypnotise them but there was no need, he could kill them with the screwdriver but there was no art.

Instead, he longed to try the new weapon in his hands out for a spin. Literally. He spun the sceptre in his hand, then spun with it as the guards attacked.

He smashed one guard's face in, and reversed his swing to break the neck of another. The drums got louder. Then he turned on the sceptre, and aimed it at the other guards. The drums reached a crescendo.

He fired the weapon.


	4. Chapter 4

And suddenly, the TARDIS materialized, and the Doctor looked up.

"He should be out there," he said softly. "Somewhere."

Carrie started, and looked up, looking at the door apprehensively.

"I'll go first," the Doctor said. "I know him well enough…"

Carrie sighed, and looked down at her feet, waiting, before summoning up the nerve to follow him.

It was a corridor. A loud alarm was blaring, and uniformed guards were running past them, holding mauls. The Doctor whistled in worry.

"That," he said quite simply, "is both bad and good"

"I'll say," said Carrie, from behind him, before realising the second half of his appraisal. "Hand on, good?"

"Good ish," the Doctor said. "If the guards can stop him, then we've had a job saved. If they can't…"

He grabbed Carrie's hand and they ran off, heading for the yelling.

They ended up in the hall, where they watched the unfolding carnage in horror.

The Master was there, wielding what appeared to be an ornate staff. He used as a bludgeoning instrument – which despite its ornamented nature, it seemed very good at being.

"That's the Sceptre!" yelled the Doctor. "The Great Sceptre of Ages! How dare he use it like that?"

"The Sceptre of what?" said Carrie in utter disbelief. "What's the Sceptre of Ages?"

"The Great Sceptre of Ages," the Doctor corrected. "An ancient relic of an ancient civilization," he continued. "And it's priceless, and now he's using it like a maul, to kill people with. That's wrong! Him even having – even _holding_ it – is wrong!"

The Doctor locked eyes with the Master, and waited until the opportune moment.

"Doctor?" said Carrie. "Are you alright?"

The Doctor had locked eyes with the Master. Just for a second, just one second. And they communicated telepathically for that one second. Time Lord minds being insanely fast and all.

'Stop this,' the Doctor said. 'There is no purpose to your doing this.'

'It's fun,' the Master protested.

'It's insane and evil,' the Doctor replied. 'You've done enough. Stop.'

'What if I choose not to stop?' the Master asked, taunting the Doctor. 'What if I choose to go further instead? Take on the universe?'

'Then I'll make you stop,' the Doctor promised him. 'If it kills me.'

The Master laughed in the mindscape.

'I almost regret not stealing your body,' he said. 'It would have been so much fun.'

'The universe doesn't exist for your personal amusement,' the Doctor snapped mentally. 'You should have learned that long ago.'

'Oh shut up and die, Doctor,' the Master said. And then the connection broke.

The Doctor snapped out of it, and pushed Carrie out of the way - just as the man turned the staff and held it in their direction.

From the bottom end, a blue beam of light zoomed towards them, but it impacted harmlessly on a wall – well, harmlessly except for the wall vanishing.

"A staser gun?" yelled the Doctor, utter disbelief evident in his voice. "The Sceptre of Corinthia is a staser gun?"

The Master turned from the two cowering time travellers towards the gaping security guards, and smiled.

"Are you going to stand there all day, or can I go now?" he asked, sarcasm lacing his voice.

To their credit, every last guard stood their ground.

But bravery was no match for the Sceptre, and the Master who whirled through first one, then the other, then a third, slicing and dicing... and when he used the weapon as a staser, the people just fell out of existence.

After a long moment, Carrie stared at the bodies, and the Doctor beside her stared right at the Master. He glared daggers at his arch foe, who simply smiled.

"It's not just a staser," he said, softly enough that only the Doctor's hearing could catch. "It's more powerful than that. Powerful enough to make me God."

And then he was gone, running down a corridor. The Doctor could have run after him but with the Sceptre it would prove too dangerous. The Doctor simply stood there for the longest moment, staring after the Master angrily, in shock and in wonder.

"Come on," he said. Carrie didn't move, violent sobs wracking her body as her gaze remained fixed on the dead guards.

"We can mourn for these people later, now come on!" the Doctor yelled. "Back to the TARDIS!"

He dragged her to her feet, and to the TARDIS, and they both went in.

Inside his TARDIS, the Master studied the Sceptre of Corinthia. It was a staser gun, as the Doctor had said - but it also had a force-field generator built in, and an energy cutter that could slice through adamant. Oh the possibilities...

Brilliant, absolutely brilliant. He could find Earth in its primitive times – well, more primitive times – and take over as a God. That might annoy the Doctor.

Before he could commence further study though, his TARDIS's cloister bell rang, to indicate extreme danger.

He went to his console to check the scanner. It had to be...

When he saw who was following him, he laughed. Of course it was.

A 1960s Police Box.

The Master laughed at the sight of it. It was so obvious. So simple.

"Oh, Doctor - you're so predictable."

He set off the temporal mines he'd been stocking, and watched them go off in front of the Doctor's TARDIS. Thinking no more of it, he turned back to his study of the Sceptre. Nothing could survive that...

The Doctor piloted the TARDIS past the Temporal mines. The Master was seriously overconfident in this body... a mistake he would regret. The mines though, refused to quit – locking onto his ship and following.

The Doctor snarled, dropped out of the Vortex, and then dropped back in, but the mines stuck. Swearing, the Doctor managed to get the mines to ram into each other, but the Master had gained a lead and Carrie was staring at him.

"Turbulence," he said by way of simple explanation.

"Where's the Master going now?" Carrie asked, ignoring this.

"No idea," the Doctor said. "I'm following him, though. We'll soon have him."

"What's a staser gun?" Carrie asked. "It's that… thing, so what was it?"

"Dangerous," the Doctor said.

"We should have just killed him there," Carrie muttered, hoping the Doctor wouldn't hear her – but he did.

"That staff is an ancient weapon from my home planet," the Doctor replied. "It might not just be a staser gun. It might well posess the power to destroy an entire planet; that's one of the things the legends mention. In the Master's hands, it could cause untold damage on a cosmic scale. Fighting him then would have been suicide; you saw what happened to those guards. And anyway, I've got to stop him myself, and I'm not killing him."

"Why not?" Carrie snapped.

"Because it wouldn't be right," the Doctor said simply.

"He's murdered all those people," Carrie said. "It has to be right. What else can you do?"

The Doctor looked at her, his eyes betraying a pain. He didn't want to answer because the simple truth was, he didn't know what he was going to do with the Master. He didn't know and he didn't like thinking about it because he knew in his hearts, he had no options.

A bleeping on the console distracted him, and he checked the scanner.

"Ah! Got him!" said the Doctor.

"Where?" asked Carrie, concerned for the inhabitants of the place the Master was, having seen his evil first hand.

The Doctor read the co-ordinates, and then blanched.

"Home," he said. "My… home…"

"Where?" Carrie asked.

"Gallifrey," the Doctor replied.


End file.
